An average movie

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but since it was starring Jesse Eisenberg, I thought I might as well check it out. Well, even though it turned out to be an interesting story, the movie itself was not really good, I’m afraid. Indeed, it seems that they took the wrong approach to this otherwise interesting material. First of all, the intro with Ed Harris was seriously lame and completely useless. Above all, even though Marcel Marceau became a war hero because he helped 100’s of children to escape Nazi France, it was never really the focus of this movie and such an actual escape took place way too late during the movie. To make things worse, Klaus Barbie actually figured out what they were doing and who was helping these kids during their very first rescue operation so how did Marceau manage to rescue more children afterwards? Instead, the movie spent way too much time focusing on the main character flirting with some random girl, something that probably never happened at all. There was even another even more half-baked romance involving his brother and the sister of the girl he had a crush on. Concerning Jesse Eisenberg, I thought he did deliver a solid performance though but you might wonder what an actual mime could have done with this part. On the other hand, they probably needed someone more famous than some obscure mime actor to be able to bankroll this movie. Eventually, I was actually above all impressed by Matthias Schweighöfer who was really convincing playing the infamous Klaus Barbie. However, it was rather weird the way they introduced this character as he randomly showed up in some clandestine gay bar in Berlin which was something completely unrelated with the rest of the movie. Anyway, to conclude, in spite of its flaws, it was not bad and I think it is worth a look but there is no doubt that it could have been so much better.